At the first shriek of the tearing iron, Alexander jumped from the
downstream side of the bridge. He struck the water without injury and
disappeared. He was under the river a long time and had great difficulty
in holding his breath. When it seemed impossible, and his chest was
about to heave, he thought he heard his wife telling him that he could
hold out a little longer. An instant later his face cleared the water.
For a moment, in the depths of the river, he had realized what it would
mean to die a hypocrite, and to lie dead under the last abandonment of
her tenderness. But once in the light and air, he knew he should live to
tell her and to recover all he had lost. Now, at last, he felt sure of
himself. He was not startled. It seemed to him that he had been through
something of this sort before. There was nothing horrible about it.
This, too, was life, and life was activity, just as it was in Boston
or in London. He was himself, and there was something to be done;
everything seemed perfectly natural. Alexander was a strong swimmer, but
he had gone scarcely a dozen strokes when the bridge itself, which had
been settling faster and faster, crashed into the water behind him.
Immediately the river was full of drowning men. A gang of French
Canadians fell almost on top of him. He thought he had cleared them,
when they began coming up all around him, clutching at him and at each
other. Some of them could swim, but they were either hurt or crazed with
fright. Alexander tried to beat them off, but there were too many of
them. One caught him about the neck, another gripped him about the
middle, and they went down together. When he sank, his wife seemed to be
there in the water beside him, telling him to keep his head, that if he
could hold out the men would drown and release him. There was something
he wanted to tell his wife, but he could not think clearly for the
roaring in his ears. Suddenly he remembered what it was. He caught his
breath, and then she let him go.
The work of recovering the dead went on all day and all the following
night. By the next morning forty-eight bodies had been taken out of the
river, but there were still twenty missing. Many of the men had fallen
with the bridge and were held down under the debris. Early on the
morning of the second day a closed carriage was driven slowly along the
river-bank and stopped a little below the works, where the river boiled
and churned about the great iron carcass which lay in a straight line
two thirds across it. The carriage stood there hour after hour, and word
soon spread among the crowds on the shore that its occupant was the wife
of the Chief Engineer; his body had not yet been found. The widows of
the lost workmen, moving up and down the bank with shawls over their
heads, some of them carrying babies, looked at the rusty hired hack many
times that morning. They drew near it and walked about it, but none of
them ventured to peer within. Even half-indifferent sightseers dropped
their voices as they told a newcomer: "You see that carriage over there?
That's Mrs. Alexander. They haven't found him yet. She got off the train
this morning. Horton met her. She heard it in Boston yesterday--heard
the newsboys crying it in the street."